It’s the utility’s biggest-ever solar facility. Last month, EPE began receiving power from the new Buena Vista solar farm, a 120-megawatt, 900-acre sea of solar panels outside of Chaparral, New Mexico. Even so, El Paso Electric has initiated plans to shutter some of its aging natural gas power plant units and rely more on solar energy. Yet in the Borderland, less than 3% of the electricity El Pasoans used last year came from renewable energy sources, a figure that pales in comparison to other utilities across both Texas and New Mexico.Ī top El Paso Electric executive cautioned against comparing figures from EPE, a monopoly utility overseen by state regulators, to ERCOT, which is a deregulated, competitive market that electricity generators sell power into. Wind and solar farms combined last year to produce 31% of the electricity on the power grid that covers most of Texas outside of El Paso – which is operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT – and that’s grown to 35% of the state’s power through the first half of this year. Last month, solar farms across Texas produced more electricity in June than they did in all of 2018. The story has been different in El Paso, however. Over the last five years, wind and solar farms have grown exponentially across Texas, transforming the state’s power grid and generating more electricity than ever this year amid the searing summer.
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